A plaque remaining from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

Above, a 1934 plaque from the Big Apple Night Club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Discarded as trash in 2006. Now a Popeyes fast food restaurant on Google Maps.

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Entry from June 07, 2013
Heroin Highway (Eighth Avenue; Long Island Expressway)

A “heroin highway” is any street where heroin is either transported or sold. Hastings Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, was called a “heroin highway” in 1955. The U.S. interstate highway system from Durango to Chicago has been called a “heroin highway.”
 
The Village Voice, in December 1977, stated that New York City’s Eighth Avenue in Harlem (now called Frederick Douglass Boulevard) was “Harlem’s famous 30-year-old heroin highway.” In January 2012, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said that the Long Island Expressway was a “heroin highway.”
 
   
Google News Archive
5 May 1955, Vancouver (British Columbia) Sun, “Single Dope Ring Corners Market,” pg. 23, col. 6:
And the drug is being distributed by pushers who have made Hastings street a heroin highway.
 
Google News Archive
12 December 1977, Village Voice (New York, NY), “Angel Dust Comest to Harlem,” pg. 15, col. 1:
Ducharme’s absent father is an 18-year-old drug dealer. He sells $50 packed of heroin known in the street as Quarters, standing day in and day out on one of the many drug corners along Eighth Avenue (recently proclaimed Frederick Douglass Boulevard, much to the mystification of Ducharme’s relatives, who ask who he was)—Harlem’s famous 30-year-old heroin highway.
 
Google Books
Smack: Heroin and the American City
By Eric C. Schneider
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press
2008
Pg. 184:
Trafficking followed the interstate highway system, sometimes referred to as the “heroin highway,” that ran from Durango to Chicago; some traffickers transported both illegal immigrants and heroin on a regular basis along this route.
 
New York (NY) Post
LIE is a drug-abuser ‘high’ way: DA
By ERIN CALABRESE
Last Updated: 7:20 AM, January 14, 2012
Posted: 1:07 AM, January 14, 2012
The Long Island Expressway is a “heroin highway” for Nassau and Suffolk junkies, Queens DA Richard Brown said yesterday.
 
Brown made the comment as he announced the arrests of 133 people, mostly Long Islanders, who traveled the LIE as they bought or sold drugs.
 
Many are using their heroin fix to supplement raging prescription-drug habits, Brown added.
     
Times Ledger (Queens, NY)
January 18, 2012 / News / Crime & Courts / Ridgewood
Qns DA renames LIE the Heroin Highway
By Joe Anuta
The 12 men and women charged by District Attorney Richard Brown with operating a small ring that sold heroin to well-to-do customers in Suffolk and Nassau counties are now working their way through the New York state court system.
 
The DA announced the bust at a Friday news conference complete with a table full of confiscated drugs and guns.
 
Queens Boulevard is already known as the “Boulevard of Death,” but the DA’s office and the NYPD charged 12 individuals with selling hard drugs to hundreds of Long Islanders who used the “Heroin Highway” — the Long Island Expressway — to get their fix in the borough.

Posted by Barry Popik
New York CityStreets • Friday, June 07, 2013 • Permalink


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